NPB Bullet Points: Mulhern, MLB Scouts, Rakuten Fireworks

by Patrick Newman (Jul 13, 2011)

Today’s news and notes from around Japan, with a focus on scouting and player personnel.

Daily Sports reports that Seibu is working on signing Ryan Mulhern out of the Mexican League. I had never heard of Mulhern
before yesterday, but he’s spent the last two seasons in indy ball and
Mexico, and prior to that it looks like he’d mostly been an
organizational player. It’s great to see this kind of player get a shot
and I wish him the best of luck.

Wladimir Balentien’s contract with Yakult includes language that prevents him from moving to another NPB team
after the season. Said someone familiar with the situation: “Discussion
about foreign players leaving the team or not ended with Chang-Yong Lim
last offseason. New players acquired since then have contractual
provisions against moving domestically.”

The “Big 3″ college pitchers – Tomoyuki Sugano, Takahiro Fujioka and Yusuke Nomura – have all disavowed interest in skipping NPB in favor of MLB. The trio had been attracting attention from MLB scouts.

In more Rakuten news, the Eagles ni-gun team has it’s own ustream.tv channel. Unfortunately the angle they shoot the games from is almost unwatchable.

And now for something completely different: Lotte has stadium and
uniform advertising for Nexon this season. I never know what Nexon does,
but I happened to find out from this English-language article on Techcrunch.